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My Samsung Galaxy A51's screen broke; I got the purple screen of death. I was able to backup up the data using Samsung Switch before the screen was completely taken over by the purple ooze. However, I ended up replacing the A51 with an LG phone and now I don't know how to restore the backup I made using Samsung Switch; I can't use the Samsung Switch app, as that only works for Samsung phones.

About the backup files: There are numerous folders, each containing a backup file for a category of data (e.g., contacts, messages, etc.). I really only need the contacts and the messages. The file extension for the contacts is "spbm" and the file extension for the messages is "smem". After googling these file extensions, it appears that these are proprietary file types that are exclusively used by Smart Switch. Sounds like I will not be able to restore this data without using Smart Switch.

Is it possible to restore my data onto the LG Phone using the backup I made with Samsung Switch?

I would just make another backup using my old phone, but the display is completely gone; I'd be flying blind.

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  • Restore it on an old samsung and then backup using android backup rather than smart switch
    – Rohit Gupta
    Commented Jan 31, 2023 at 3:11

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I can give you part of the solution, which is that SPBM is just ZIP with the file extension changed. Most likely, SMEM is the same deal. However, once you open the ZIP file (e.g by changing the extension to ZIP), the contacts are stored in a ".BK" format, which Notepad thinks is UTF-16 LE text. I have a suspicion that it's some kind of binary-to-text since Samsung has been known to use similar encodings with contacts. The hex editor shows the length of the .BK is 16-byte-divisible, which would be typical of a binary.

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